ROI in the form of salary data is absurd.
I kind of agree with @Brantly. It’s interesting to note that prior to the 2008 recession, when people referenced the WSJ ranking, it was based on the numbers of graduates who entered top professional schools. But, with high debt and a general consensus that the legal profession is over saturated, ROI has become a buzzword when, TBH it’s nothing more than a surrogate marker for how many graduates have gone into engineering. Meh, times change. At least WSJ was uprfront about what they were measuring in the old poll.
Of course trying to reduce the value of an particular college to a specific expected ROI is meaningless. I do think looking at various data points on outcome is useful when comparing colleges, which is what any ranking system is. Percentage of graduates working full time, in grad school, their median starting salary (even better when segmented by major/group of majors), the avg net cost to attend that school, the avg debt of graduates are all good data points to consider, and which most families consider in one fashion or another among other things as they do their internal rankings. How many threads on these pages deal with if it is worth it to take on debt/pay huge amounts to go to highly selective schools? How many times do people postulate (sometimes supported by independent data, others not) that if you are X major, it matters/doesn’t matter where you get your undergrad degree for purposes of employment or grad school. I for one would like for all schools (undergrad, grad, professional, vocational) to be required to provide a standardized set of outcomes related data by major/department.
The WSJ tries to take it one step further by trying factor “value added” – "The data team uses statistical modelling to create an expected graduate salary for each college based on a wide range of factors, such as the make-up of its students and the characteristics of the institution. The ranking looks at how far the college either exceeds expectations in getting students higher average salaries than one would predict based on its students and its characteristics, or falls below what is expected. " How valid their modeling is is certainly open to debate, but the principle is legitimate.
@firmament2x , I think you meant to say the opposite in the last para of Post #18. Might just be how the sentence came out. The ROI would be infinite if all the students got to go to the school for free (vs all the students being full pay).
@BKSquared . . . the implication would be that if a family is able to pay full price, then the decimal point to them is translated over to the left at least one or maybe two decimal points, meaning that even a $250k tuition bill means little to them.
But additionally, for the service academies there is opportunity cost wrt to time, because those enrolled in them will have to serve time. They are not “free.”
I am a bit surprised that my school, Northwestern, did so well in the outcome given that 1/3 of the student body are in schools of music, journalism, education and communication (including performing arts and theater). Not that you can’t reach high salary in those fields but it’s harder on average.
Outcome (as measured by salary) is in general much more a function of the career choice than where you went to college. An average cpa is gonna easily make more money than a stellar HS teacher! Such measure penalizes schools heavily invested in low paying fields like music, arts, journalism, social work, education, etc.
Does anyone know how the category Academic Spending Per Student is calculated?
“By looking at the amount of money that each institution spends on teaching per student (11%), we can get a clear sense of whether it is well funded, with the money to provide a positive learning environment. This metric takes into account spending on both undergraduate and graduate programmes, which is consistent with the way that the relevant spend data is available in IPEDS. Schools are required by the Department of Education to report key statistics such as this to IPEDS, making it a comprehensive source for education data. The data on academic spending per institution are adjusted for regional price differences, using regional price parities data from the US Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis.”
If the figure quoted in the WSJ article includes money spent on grad students, is there any way of knowing how much is spent on undergrads?
The reporting of pay levels for graduates of a given college also conceals the effect of choice of major (for either an individual student or the distribution of major choices at the college) on pay levels.
They do have graduate-pay-based rankings of colleges for some (not many) specific majors, but these tend not to be used by those using those rankings as a component of college rankings.
Note that spending per student can give large distortions when the college has a medical school whose spending gets pulled into the measure.
Thanks @ucbalumnus. I was wondering about that, and how much various grad school programs cost to operate.
Wash U’s academic spending per student is $172K–Yikes!
IPEDS data on “Instruction” includes departmental research (which of course isn’t instruction), but that is how a federal OMB circular allows it to be accounted. So someone can be taking a semester off to publish something or submit a research proposal and it is accounted for as “Instruction”, which is used in these rankings. It also tends to be significantly higher for universities that have medical school (look at UCLA vs. Berkeley), but of course none of that is really relevant to undergraduate instruction.
Where is the University of Chicago? I always thought US News over rated them, but they appear to have vanished from the top schools in the WSJ list. Why is it so hard to get them ranked reasonably?
It’s number 14 on the list. Wouldn’t the lack of disclosure make it harder to properly analyze?
@ucbalumnus . . .
Per your quote:
I neglected to include major which would be the best thing to base a sample size, thanks.
I believe they supposedly included them in the Forbes outcomes. But I understand Payscale’s point: To which program does one attribute success for someone who goes to Southwest Missouri State and then after four years of employment attends Harvard Business School?
Not only has her income stream not been steady, it’s interrupted (HBS: one cannot serve two masters); it’s finite, and convoluted, and this is just one person. No two people have the same debt load, no two people have the same income streams. So how can one assemble all these disparate elements into one figure? How is ROI calculable?